Industry 4.0 — Reinventing the Factory Stack

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Update Dec 23rd: I’ve added 30+ companies to the landscape. If you want to appear please send your info here.

If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up today as a software and analytics company.

Jeffrey Immelt, former CEO of General Electric, nails it down. Industrial companies are feeling the increasing pressure to adapt to the changing environment. They experience the shift to new business models and the need to implement new technologies. After steam, electricity and computers, there are now a huge wave of new technologies shaping the industrial sector, broadly described as cyber physical systems. This includes cloud computing, IoT and bringing together the physical, digital and biological worlds.

In the following post, I want to outline my thinking around evaluating Industry 4.0 startups, present opportunities and risks of this market, map 100+ companies as examples and try to give some advice to founders in this industry based on all the discussion I had.
For a broader overview of the different industrial revolutions, see this Forbes article, Bastian Bergmann’s post here or watch this video from the World Economic Forum.

The four Industrial Revolutions (Source: Marcellus Drilling)